The language of schooling registers in vietnamese an initial study investigating written texts of vietnamese german adolescents

“The Language of Schooling” Registers in Vietnamese: An Initial Study Investigating Written Texts of Vietnamese-German Adolescents Trần Thị Minh1 Abstract In English The present study introduces the categories for evaluating the “language of schooling” patterns in Vietnamese writing texts and draws on the LiPS data, a pilot study about multilingual in University of Hamburg, to analyze Vietnamese writing competence of Vietnamese-German adolescents through “the language of schooling” features to examine the reliability and validity of those categories Although, the features of “the language of schooling” in Vietnamese is so complex, four patterns such as passive, compounds, SinoVietnamese and impersonally expression are discussed In Vietnamese Nghiên cứu giới thiệu công cụ đánh giá yếu tố “ngôn ngữ trường học” văn viết tiếng Việt phân tích liệu LiPS, nghiên cứu thử nghiệm đa ngôn ngữ Đại học Hamburg, để xác định tính tin cậy tính thực tiễn cơng cụ đánh giá Mặc dù yếu tố “ngôn ngữ nhà trường” tiếng Việt phức tạp nghiên cứu bốn yếu tố coi thảo luận, bao gồm thể bị động, từ ghép phức, từ Hán Việt cách thể khách quan Introduction The effects of globalization can be observed in a multicultural world, especially in Europe and Northern America Germany has developed into a land of immigration Im- and emigration always connected to multilingual and contact between the different language and cultural groups, and give raise researches in language contact and multilingual, mainly concern to sociolinguistics, which deal with language change, language variation, language mixing and the emergency of new contact language The development of language have strong connection with the educational purposes, because it “contributes substantially to academic and vocational success” throughout the lifespan (Nippold 2007: 3) However, in PhD Student at University of Hamburg, Germany and lecturer in Faculty of Vietnamese Studies, Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam cf Limbird (2006: 44), Stanat, Rauch & Segeritz (2010: 200, 210), Keim (2012: 1-3.) cf Keim (2012: 1), Bhatia (2013: 1) fact, later language4 development in general and especially in multilingual contexts seems to be “under-researched” (Duarte 2015: 222) Academic language/ “language of schooling” registers are so far different from the ordinary language Studying about the development of children language shows that at the beginning the children draw on the grammar of informal interaction, and then they need to go beyond those choices if they are to become successful in school-based ways of using language (Schleppegrell, 2006: 112) Christie (1998a) claims that the “language of schooling” features develop slowly and that “development of control of many aspects of written language is a feature of late childhood and adolescence” (p 69)5 To produce the texts of advanced literacy, the development of expertise with the genres of various disciplines and the register features of the language of schooling is necessary to move from writing procedural recounts to constructing theoretical explanations with technical lexis and grammatical metaphor in causal and consequential processes, in which grammatical metaphor is considered as a challenge for students, because it does not emerge in students’ writing until the secondary school years (Christie, 2002b; Halliday, 1993e, 1993g) However, less work has been done related to the kinds of tasks that challenge students in middle school, high school, and postsecondary education (Schleppegrell 2006: 5) This situation call for studies about the language development of adolescents, especially “language of schooling” which adolescents/ students acquire through learning language in the “school” to use language in particular ways in order to be express successfully in many disciplines; to develop interpretations, construct arguments, and critique theories Heritage language (HL)8 has been interested in USA and Canada since 60s-70s By contrast with the other Central- and Northern European countries, in Germany, about 50% students of the second generation of migration speak the language of origin (heritage language) at home, only in Denmark, the rate is higher (Stanat, Rauch & Segeritz 2010: 2104 Studying on language acquisition, Nippold (2007) indicated that the phase of later language development encompasses school-age children (6-12), adolescents (13-19) and young adults (20-30) Cf Schleppegrell (2006: ) Cf Schleppegrell (2006: 144) In this paper, “school” could cover both narrow and broad understandings, one is a unitary construct of classroom and school, another is conceptualized as the institutional framework in which children are socialized into ways of formal learning in our society (Schleppegrell 2006: 5) The term „heritage language“ is a language spoken by the children of immigrants or by those who immigrated to a country when they were young This term will be explained in more detail in the chapter Fishman’s study on language maintenance and shift has been considered as the groundwork for the heritage language field And Cummins pointed out, the term heritage language was used in Canada in the late 1970s in the context of the Ontario Heritage Language Programs (Deusen-Scholl : Research on heritage language issues In Handbook of Heritage, Community, and Native American Language in the United States) 211) As of late, the issue of HL has been recently discussed in Germany as following: heritage language as resources (Fürstenau 2005, Dollmann & Kristen 2010), the issue of the heritage language in school or dual program of bilingual school (Duarte 2011), and the orthography and literacy acquisition (Grießhaber & Kalkavan 2014) Concerning to Vietnamese diaspora, studying about Vietnamese as HL, especially in USA and Australia focusing on some following topics: (1) Vietnamese heritage language loss and shift (Min Zhou 2001; Maloof, Rubin and Miller 2008); (2) Maintaining the heritage language is not the barrier to acquisition the second language (Nguyen, Shin and Kraschen 2010); (3) The role of a Vietnamese heritage language school in cross-cultural adaption (Maloof, Rubin and Miller 2008); (4) Attitudes of parents and students toward maintaining Vietnamese as heritage language (Nguyen, Shin and Kraschen 2010), (Lewis, Bui M and Do H N 2011), (Lam H 2011); (5) Vietnamese as HL proficiency assessment (Maloof, Rubin and Miller 2008), (Nguyen, Shin and Kraschen 2010); (6) language use including codeswitching in immigrant Vietnamese community and family (Tran T B M 2008, Ho-Dac T 2003, Thai D B ) In Germany, Vietnamese comprise the largest Asian ethnic group 10 Nevertheless, there are only few studies related to this diaspora group Recent years, educationists and linguists have chosen Vietnamese because Vietnamese students actually achieved impressive success in German school There are approximate 59% Vietnamese students of this immigration group in grammar schools (Gymnasium), therefore, they are considered as success as German children who keep 43% in this kind of school (Peters 2011) Examples of studies conducted in Hamburg include LiPS in 2009-2013 (LiMA Panel Study), HeBe 2013-2015 (Herkunf und Bildungserfolg) and KiBis 2014-2015 (Mehrsprachige Kinder auf dem Weg zur Bildungssprache) As of late, Vietnamese as HL in Germany begins to be studied (König, 2011; Klinger, 2015; Siedmund & Lechner, 2015) However, it can be stated that studying Vietnamese as HL in Germany in general, creating the tools and instruments for measuring language in particular are still lack Our present study therefore will be contribute the understanding about the above issues to give more impulses for creating language and culture programs as well as language policies through two following research questions: Which features could be considered as indicators of “language of schooling” in Vietnamese language?; and To what extend are the features of Vietnamese “language of schooling” represented in the writing texts of Vietnamese-German adolescents? 10 Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland – Startseite Destatis.de (2008-10-20) Research on “language of schooling” A program for classroom-based research on language was proposed by Hymes since 1972, involving the types of tasks, participants’ structure, and speech and literacy events that reconcile the typical school experience11 Hymes also pointed out: “an adequate theory of the functioning of language would not ‘start’ from either language or context, but would systematically relate the two within a single model” (1972: xix) After that, Halliday’s researches (Halliday 1985, 1994) related to functional grammar creates the conception about the relationship between linguistic choices of speakers and writers in particular moments of interaction and the social contexts, in which school is a context which helps to build the language development of the children and adolescents In this paper, “school” could cover both narrow and broad understandings, one is a unitary construct of classroom and school, another is conceptualized as the institutional framework in which children are socialized into ways of formal learning in our society (Schleppegrell 2006: 5)12 Based on the works of Halliday related to functional linguistics, Schleppegrell (2006: 1) analyzed the texts which students are asked to read and write at school, then tried to find common linguistic features of the school-based tasks and determine the possibility of the construal of increasingly specialized knowledge of those features as students’ progress through school.13 The differences between speech and writing, expressing the challenges to deal in a writing mode at school have been much concerned in studies about students’ language development and analysis of school-based language The school features of “literate” texts have been defined as decontextualized, explicit, and complex (Gumperz, Kaltman, & O’Connor, 1984; Michaels & Cazden, 1986; Michaels & Collins, 1984; Olson, 1977, 1980; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Snow, 1983; Torrance & Olson, 1984)14 From the works of Oslon (1977) and Snow (1983), decontextualization is reviewed by Schleppegrell (2006: 7-8) as written text could be understood without context and speaker presuppositions 15 11 cf Schleppegrell (2006: x) 12 Schleppegrell (2006: 5) said that “school” is also presented here as a unitary construct, although each classroom and each school has its own subculture and its own ways of using language for learning School can also be conceptualized broadly as the institutional framework in which children are socialized into ways of formal learning in our society, and it is this understanding of school that informs the discussion here 13 “Learning language” and “learning through language” are simultaneous (Halliday 1993g) 14 See the view of the studies in Schleppegrell (2006: 6) 15 Olson’s argument about „the meaning is in the text“ and teaching children to “speak a written language” have been extensively critiqued Although Olson himself has somewhat modified the strong position (Olson 1994), his views are still influential For Snow (1983), decontextualization is language used “without the support of conversational context” (Schleppegrell 2006: 7-8) From a functional point of view, however, the language of schooling is not decontextualized, just unfamiliar to many students (Sinclair, 1993)16 Explicitness focus on linguistic features such as the use of full noun phrases instead of pronouns, avoidance of deictic expression that require situational context for understanding, and use of markers of organizational structure as evidence for greater explicitness (Schleppegrell 2006: 10) However, it is impossible to make written language fully explicit because of the importance of contextual assumptions for interpretation (Sinclair, 1993)17 The written language of schooling is also considered as more “complex” than the language of ordinary spoken interaction Halliday (1987, 1989) argues that speaking and writing have different kinds of complexity In spoken language, introduction and elaboration of background is often more complex than the other parts Besides, use of conjunctions and discourse markers creating coherent, and use of intonation marking information structure are important In academic writing language, the complexity is expressed through elaboration in internal clause structure through nominal elements expanded with pre- and postmodification by adjectives, prepositional phrases, and embedded clauses Participles, adverbial phrases, and other devices allow for expansion of clause-internal structure at the same time that infinitive clauses, restrictive relative clauses, and other such structures allow for the embedding and integration of ideas in complex clauses (Chafe, 1985)18 In educational and linguistic research, a construct like subordination 19 has been frequently used as an evaluation tool of language complexity Subordination is seen as an important pattern of academic language because it performs the embedding of one clause within another in a hierarchical relationship (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1972) 20 From the equation of subordination21 with complexity in measurement of language performance, and the further equation of linguistic complexity and cognitive skill, 16 Cf Schleppegrell (2006: 12) 17 Cf Schleppegrell (2006: 11) 18 Cf Schlepperell (2006: 13) 19 Relative clauses, complement clauses, and adverbial clauses introduced by subordinators such as because, although, if, before, since, and others are typically considered subordinate clauses, but some “subordinate” clauses play nonsubordinating roles as broader discourse links (Schleppegrell 2006: 13-14) 20 Cf Schleppegrell (2006: 14) 21 Romaine (1984: 145) also points out that “children’s language development has often been assessed in terms of measures which rely on the assumption that having strategies for subordinating and embedding sentences within each other is indicative of greater cognitive skill and verbal ability” Her research reveals that certain constructions may be acquired and used only in certain contexts, such as school, and suggests that studies of syntactic structure must focus on the pragmatic and semantic, as well as the syntactic, aspects of these constructions Her view is that all children have competence in using complex syntax, but that situationally such use may be differentially displayed, due to different experiences in use of language and expectations about the context in which the language is elicited (cf Schlepegrell, 2006: 14) Schleppegrell (2006: 14) proposes that “an accurate definition and analysis of complexity is an important issue for both educational and linguistic research” Schleppegrell (2006) has argued that the descriptions of “literate language” as explicit, decontextualized, complex, and cognitively demanding have limitations, and has suggested that Halliday’s functional linguistic analysis offers an alternative perspective on the language of schooling Systemic functional linguistics uses the notion of linguistic register to illuminate the relationship between language and context The constellation of lexical and grammatical features may realize a certainly situational context (Halliday & Hasan, 1989), so registers could not be considered as some fix features because what we through language varies and changes from context to context22 Register is not just about lexical choices “Registers […] also involve new styles of meaning, ways of developing an argument, and of combining existing elements into new combinations” (Halliday, 1978, p 196) Register variation such as lexical and grammatical choices is suitable for differences of the context in terms of field (what is talked about), tenor (the relationship between speaker/hearer or writer/reader), and mode (expectations for how particular text types should be organized) (Schleppegrell 2006: 46) Christie (2002b: 46) points out that the “academic language” features, including control of grammatical metaphor, “create the capacity in the successful writer, to handle the building of generalization, abstraction, argument, and reflection upon experience” To produce the texts of advanced literacy, the development of expertise with the genres of various disciplines and the register features of the language of schooling is necessary to move from writing procedural recounts to constructing theoretical explanations with technical lexis and grammatical metaphor in causal and consequential processes, in which grammatical metaphor is considered as a challenge for students, because it does not emerge in students’ writing until the secondary school years (Christie, 2002b; Halliday, 1993e, 1993g)23 For German language, according to Jürgen Habermas (1977) “language of schooling” as ‘Bildungsprachliche Elemente’24 is that linguistic register in which man can gain a basic knowledge of orientation by learning in the school Basing on specific continual researches, the elements such as Nominalisierung (nomalisation), Komposita (compounds), Attributkonstruktionen (attribute constructions), Partizipien (Partical), Passive (passive) and unpersönliche Ausdrücke (impersonally expression) are often discussed as the key patterns of German “the language of schooling” 22 Cf Schleppegrell (2006: 20) 23 Cf Schleppegrell (2006: 144) 24 In this case is language which is used more in writing language and was acquired through attending school Controversially, the researches related to Vietnamese “the language of schooling” like are still lack “Academic language” is frequently concerned as the language in academic works from the light of stylistics: (a) using amount of technical terms or specific terms as well as expressions of technical or specific terms; (b) using amount of borrowed terms and structures from Western languages; (c) being tendency to be neutral and objective by using impersonally expression (Dinh Trong Lac, 1998) Methodology Sample Our study draws the data collected by LiPS25 (LiMA Panel Studies), in which the participants were chosen randomly from Hamburg households based on age and the following factor: children of the bilingual group, or at least one parent, had to be born or had to have the citizenship of Vietnam (Klinger et al 2015) 28 Vietnamese-German adolescents at the age of 15-year-old attended this study at the first test session In the second one the number decreases to 24 After controlling, 20 participants who did fully both of written texts in two languages and in two time tests were chosen to analyze In term of acquiring Vietnamese, 18 adolescents started at birth, of which one started with both languages, Vietnamese and German (CE_8)26 Test instruments The boomerang for 15-year-olds includes two tasks, but in this study, we only focus on the first one The first task comprised the ‘Boomerang test’ that was developed by German educationists within the model programme Förderung von Kindern und Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund (FörMig) aiming at investigating so-called ‘the language of schooling’ (Döll&Dirim 2011: 161-162) In this task, the children were required as following: “Now please write the article that explains how the boomerang is made On the next page you will find a set of pictures that you have to describe in your article Your article needs to be understandable without the pictures“(see full exercise and pictures in appendix 1) Analysis instruments 25 For a detailed project description see http://www.lips.uni-hamburg.de The LiPS study was part of the research program of the Cluster of Excellence “Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Area” (LiMA) at the University of Hamburg We express our gratitude to the Federal State Agency for funding LiMA project Special thanks are due to Ingrid Gogolin and the whole staff of the LiPS study for granting permission to use the sociolinguistic background data as well as the linguistic data from Vietnamese group for the present study 26 Results from question in CaPI for parents which is coded as CE_8 The Vietnamese category for analyzing the boomerang test includes items for the first part as following table: Table Analysis categories Vietnamesisch Deutsch Aufgabenbewältigung (task performance) + Adressierung (the forms of adress) + SchriftsprachlichkeitBildungsprachliche Elemente (the elements of language of schooling) + Textstrukturierung (text structure) + Klassifikator Morphologie (classifier) (Morphology) Wortschatz (vocabulary) Verbindung + von (cohesion) Zusammenfassung Sätzen + + (summary) Despite eight items were developed parallel with the German one, it is still very difficult to compare between both languages, except for the first part (related to cognition of exercises) Task performance (Aufgabenbewältigung) is a global assessment for the written answer of the task, due to draw up an instruction of creating boomerang Linguistic means, cognitive approaches and conceptual knowledge interlock each other It is considered as a global way to know, how effective the students to name all the materials and to describe the right steps for the construction of a boomerang 27 Since the evaluation isn’t related to syntactic, lexical and morphological criteria, it is possible to compare between two languages directly (Reich, Roth & Döll 2009) The other items were improved basing on research frameworks related to Vietnamese language from different linguistics aspects Because of typological difference 28 between Vietnamese and German, instead of examining morphology such as using articles, in Vietnamese, using classifiers are evaluated Besides, elements of language of schooling (Bildungsprachliche Elemente) were completely new developed Therefore, classifier and elements of language of schooling will be introduced and discussed more details than the other sections Registers of “language of schooling” developed by LiPS Basing on the studies of Lê A, Nguyễn Văn Ninh and Bùi Minh Toán (1996) related to teaching language in Vietnamese school, and the language teaching curriculum (named Tiếng Việt), the present paper tries to find initially some important features which describe Vietnamese “language of schooling” to measure Vietnamese writing texts of VietnameseGerman adolescents in Hamburg and Vietnamese adolescents in Hanoi as control group In LiPS categories, the “language of schooling” patterns are analyzed implicit from many perspectives, for example in text pragmatics through evaluating of the form of address or text structure; in lexis through counting technical noun, verb and adjective; in syntax through investigating the use of conjunctions and sentence structures Especially, in the LiPS formula of analysis, there is a part named “Bildungsprachliche Elemente” (the elements of language of schooling/ the elements of academic language) with four elements such as ‘thể bị động’ (passive), ‘từ ghép’ (compounds), từ Hán Việt (và từ mượn chuyên ngành) (Sino-Vietnamese and technical borrowed words) and cách thể khách quan (impersonally expression) 27 See Reich, Roth & Döll (2009) 28 Vietnamese is isolating language, in which the inflectional endings not exist and all of words are invariable Grammatical relationships are expressed by the use of auxiliary words and word order (Ngo 20 : 10) While German is a fusional language with a moderate degree of inflection, with three grammatical genders; there can be a large number of words derived from the same root (Martin D & Hammer A.E 2002: 1-10) Passive in Vietnamese Concerning to passive voice/ passive sentences/ passive constructions in Vietnamese language, there are until now fruitful debates According to Nguyễn Hồng Cổn and Bùi Thị Diên (2004), some linguists (G Cardier, M.B Emeneau, Trần Trọng Kim, L.C Thompson) claim that Vietnamese is an isolating language, in which the morphology of word isn’t changed to tense, aspect, gender and numerous, therefore it can’t satisfy strictly morphological criteria of passive voice as grammatical category Besides, depending on the approaches of Ch.N Li and S.A Thompson (1976) related to the opposite of the languages “tendency to subject” and “tendency to topic”, the researchers as Nguyễn Thị Ảnh (2000) and Cao Xuân Hạo (2001) confirmed that Vietnamese is the language “tendency to topic”, then it is difficult to exist the passive constructions Moreover, in order to confirm that passive voice doesn’t exist in Vietnamese, Nguyễn Thị Ảnh and Cao Xuân Hạo showed many examples for “bị/được” as the modality verbs and predicate verbs (which Alves (1998) addresses as affective verbs), not as the functional words operating as the passive construction markers In contrast, the linguists such as Nguyễn Phú Phong, Hoàng Trọng Phiến, Diệp Quang Ban ( Nguyễn Hồng Cổn & Bùi Thị Diên (2004)) as well as Nguyễn Hồng Cổn (2008) claim that passive voice exists in Vietnamese but not with a purely morphological phenomenon, passive acts as a syntactic phenomenon, marked by word order and function word (bị/được) These linguists proved the existence of passive constructions in Vietnamese by giving the opinions as below: (1) it shouldn’t think that “passive voice” as a morphological phenomenon and “passive constructions” are homogenous Therefore, it can’t be said that Vietnamese hasn’t passive constructions/ passive sentence unless it has passive form as a morphological phenomenon; (2) “topic” and “subject” can exist stimulously and they not effect to each other in the analysis of sentence structure In fact, sentence with “subject” is more common than the one with only “topic” and most of transitive constructions have subjects, it is enough evidence to admit the existence of passive; (3) “bị/ được” acts completely as the markers of passive, although they can play as a head of prediction Concerning to semantic, semantic primitives ‘suffer‘ and ‘benefit’ of ‘bị/được’ in passive constructions not obstruct the ability of their own passive markers in grammaticalization In regard to language and culture, in particularly in using passive constructions in Vietnamese, Trần Ngọc Thêm (2004) stated: Vietnamese like using active constructions than passive ones They even use active constructions in passive ones In fact, because of requirement of objectiveness in academic works and influence of western language, passive constructions are used more often As discussed above, the passive constructions in 10 Vietnamese are not clear like the German, English ones, it should be essential, to pay attention for evaluation according to instructions as below: - Although, the passive voice in Vietnamese is often expressed and recognized by “được/bị” + verb, for example, ‘Miếng gỗ gắn cố định mặt bàn’ (The piece of wood is fixed on the table), there are some cases, in which these two words not perform passive meanings, for example, ‘Nó bị ngã’ (He/ She SUFFER felt down), ‘Hôm em thử bumơrang’ (Today I BENEFIT go to try the boomerang) - Nevertheless, not all passive meanings are marked clearly with “được/bị”, e.g ‘Bài văn viết hay’ (The literature text was written beautiful) For these cases, the semantic of sentence should be analyzed Compounds in Vietnamese The second factor related to ‘Bildungsprache’ is ‘từ ghép’ (as ‘compound’ in English, as ‘Komposita in German’) Thompson (1965) said: “The formal characteristics of compounds are not entirely clear, and in many individual cases it is difficult to determine whether a morpheme sequence constitutes a compound or a phrase” Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (2004) also gave his opinion: because ‘morpheme’ in Vietnamese is assumed that phonological form coincides with syllable, distinguishing compound words (fixed combination) and free combination (clause) is actually difficult, and there are existence of series of vague cases Thompson (1965) given some terms related to word classification as following simple words, complex words and compound words Simple words consist largely monosyllabic words, but also many polysyllabic ones The reduplicative words which have similarity of sounds of syllables were considered as simple words There are perfect reduplicative words, consisting of two identical syllables, and partial reduplicative words, containing similar (but not identical) syllables Those in which the similarity of syllables consists of identical initial consonants or clusters are called alliterative Those in which the similarity lies in the nucleus (vocalic, with final consonant, if any) are called riming Reduplicative simple words appear exactly like reduplicative complex words There are pseudo-compounds which containing pseudo-bases29 such as quốc-gia nation, country (quốc ‘nation’ and gia ‘household’; ‘establishment’); bình-an be well, safe (bình ‘be calm, peaceful’ and an ‘be assured, peaceful, safe’) and derivatives which containing affixes30 such as rõ-rệt ‘be very clear, obvious’: rõ ‘be clear’ Compound words or simply compounds 29 Thompson (1965): Bound morphemes having only a single monosyllabic allomorph each are pseudo-bases 30 Other bound morphemes (having multiple allomorphs or allomorphs shorter than one syllable) are affixes 11 were claimed by Thompson (1965) as following: “In general a sequence of two or more words However, there are borderline cases where such sequences appear to be more like complex words.” Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (2004) claims that the term of “từ ghép” (compound words) used in his study is equivalent to “từ đa tiết” (polysyllables) Because of preceding definition, many words were considered as simple words such as châu chấu, a xít by Thompson but Nguyễn Tài Cẩn assumed that they belong to compounds Compounds divided into từ ghép nghĩa (semantic compounds), for example, ‘học trò’ pupil , ‘dân số’ population, ‘điểm cao’ high score; and từ láy âm (the factors are combined through relation of phonology) such as ‘làm lụng’ work (usually used with emotion), đất đai land (usually used with emotion), mạnh mẽ strong Đỗ Hữu Châu (2007) claimed that Vietnamese vocabulary having simple words, compounds and one special compounds named từ láy (alliterative word) which was usually studied especially because of ability of emotional expression In Đỗ Hữu Châu’s works, the vague and ambiguous cases were studied clearly as following: There are vocabularies such as ‘ba ba’ trionychid turtle, ‘cào cào’ locust, ‘chấu chấu’ grasshopper having alliterative forms but they should be considered as simple words because they not have ‘ý nghĩa tổng loại’ (general meaning) neither ‘ý nghĩa phi cá thể’ (nonindividual meaning) as other alliterative nouns The borrowed words such as ‘a xít’ acid, bu-ri or the original names of different language Play-cu, Buôn Mê Thuột are considered as simple nouns because all of phenomenon can express the meaning of these ‘words’ Since Đỗ Hữu Châu (1986) developed the criteria for distinguishing compounds and phrases Some preceding linguists tried to classify ‘doubtful cases’ by inserting, expanding, replacing, reducing But Đỗ Hữu Châu assumed that if they are vague cases and doubtful cases then above methods cannot give the exact answer such as ‘nhà trẻ’ (kindergarten), ‘mắt bồ câu’ (dove eyes, described beautiful eyes), ‘bụng cóc’ (toad-bell, described who, especially children, has a big bell) According to him although we consider the forms as a main criteria, there is always behind a criteria of lexical semantic He gave the particular cases as following: The combination between a formal word with a verb or an adjective, for example, ‘sự mệt mỏi’ tiredness, ‘nỗi buồn’ sadness, … creates the phrases; The cases such as ‘nghe thấy’ hear, ‘cảm thấy’ feel, ‘tạo ra’ create, ‘bụng cóc’ toad-bell, ‘mắt bồ câu’ dove-eyes should be regarded as phrases 12 Basing on the preceding researches, the evaluation of ‘compounds’ has been done with some notes as following: - Compounds consist of both ‘từ ghép’ (compound words) and ‘từ láy’ (alliterative words) - Basing on Đỗ Hữu Châu’s research to eliminate the polysyllabic simple words - Basing on lexical semantic to distinguish compounds and phrases Sino-Vietnamese The next factor related to ‘Bildungsprache’ is determined as Sino-Vietnamese which is of Chinese origin or makes use of morphemes of Chinese origin (similar to the use of Latin/Greek in English) A point of view of some well-known Vietnamese scholars has existed for long time that according to ‘Chinese central theory’ (thuyết Hoa tâm), as a result of a thousand years of Chinese occupation, and a further thousand years of strong Chinese influence, a lot of Chinese vocabulary was adopted into Vietnamese Literary Chinese was used in administration, and thus terms relating to science, politics, education, and philosophy entered the common lexicon There are until 30% to 60% Vietnamese vocabulary of Chinese in origin Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (2004), Nguyễn Ngọc San (2004) shared the opinion that Vietnamese vocabulary borrowed Chinese in two periods; ‘Tiền Hán-Việt’ (pre SinoVietnamese) ‘Hán-Việt Việt hóa’ (nativized Sino-Vietnamese) Mark J Alves in many researches also claims that a noticeable portion of both content words and function words in Vietnamese is Chinese in origin which mostly based on the relative similarity of pronounce of Vietnamese and Chinese words Nom and Sino-Vietnamese was considered as two different categories, one belongs to ‘literary’, and one belongs to ‘colloquial’ However, there was also different voice from H Frey (according to Hà Văn Thùy 2013) in the work named ‘L’Annamite mère des langues’, in which Vietnamese was considered as origin of all eastern languages Currently, Hà Văn Thùy (2004, 2013) shared the H Frey’s opinion and tried to find the clear evidence in order to prove that there is not any factor called ‘từ Hán Việt’ (SinoVietnamese) because he found some historical evidence which would give the controversial conclusions In this present study, according to traditional researches of numerous linguists, we still use the term ‘từ Hán-Việt’ (Sino-Vietnamese) for class of vocabulary in Vietnamese which normally was used in formal context for solemn expression Although Sino-Vietnamese includes both of content words and function words In this category, we only consider to content words ‘Pre Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary’ transferred to Vietnamese unsystematically is mostly monosyllabic, therefore it wouldn’t be considered The 13 words indicating name of foods, name of people, as well as name of places wouldn’t be counted In current Vietnamese vocabulary, Sino-Chinese morphemes are usually bound morpheme which cannot active as a simple word Therefore, most of Sino-Vietnamese are compounds In order to determine Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, we should base on its grammatical, semantic and stylistic features (Nguyễn Thị Hai) as following: Grammatical characteristics - The order of the main-sub factors of Sino-Vietnamese compounds (sub-main) are different the order of Vietnamese (main-sub) For examples, ‘bạch mã’ white horse - Besides, there are some exceptions which bring the structure like Vietnamese, but these combinations are not able to change the orders, for examples, ‘hợp lí’ sensible, ‘bãi chức’ dismiss, ‘thất học’ illiterate - The portion of Sino-Vietnamese has possibility of creating from suffix or prefix such as ‘sĩ’, ‘giả’, ‘viên’, ‘nhân’ (suffix for indicating human), phi, vô, bất (prefix for indicating ‘none’) For instance, ‘chiến sĩ’ soldier, ‘bác sĩ’ doctor, ‘thạc sĩ’ master, ‘tiến sĩ’ doctor; vơ lí’ unreasonable, ‘vơ tội’ not have guilt, ‘vô danh’ unknown Semantic characteristics Most of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary has abstract meaning determining concepts belonging to philosophy, history, literature Stylistic characteristics Because of having abstract and general meanings, Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary is suitable for formal context Impersonal expression Impersonal expression/ objective expressions are considered as an important factor to distinguish ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ spoken language and Bildungsprache (academic language) Impersonal expressions in Vietnamese could be identified by passive constructions concerned as above; nominalization, for example, ‘Tôi làm bu-mơ-rang tiếng.’ I make CL boomerang last over one hour It took over one hour for me to create the boomerang is changed ‘Thiết kế bu-mơ-rang tiếng.’ Creating CL boomerang lasts over one hour Creating a boomerang takes over one hour 14 Besides, using subjects not indicating ‘person’ such as ‘nghiên cứu này’ (the/ this study) is also a method to practice ‘depersonalization strategies’ Four discussed elements are considered as “the language of schooling” patterns of Vietnamese to analyze the LiPS data In coming part of this paper, the discussion about the reliability and validity of those features will be examined Discussion According to the adaption of functional linguistic for investigating “the language of schooling” registers, the “academic language” elements should be created based on genres and particular context Although the evaluation of “the language of schooling” is complex and should be analyzed from many linguistic levels such as lexis, pragmatics as well as syntax, this paper only discuss a part of that which is called as “Bildungsprachliche Elemente” in LiPS formula with four patterns such as passive, compounds, Sino-Vietnamese words and technical words, as well as impersonally expression Concerning to passive using, there are only two participants using passive in their Vietnamese writing texts in the first session and no one using this pattern in the second session, while there are eleven participants using passive correctly in their German writing texts in the first time test and eight using this feature correctly to fulfill the task in the second In Vietnamese texts of Vietnamese control group, passive constructions not exists in any texts Two Vietnamese texts of Vietnamese-German adolescents which have passive times (13308531) and times (133130) get the highest score Hence, the analyzed results bring some questions such as whether passive voices/ passive constructions should be considered as a factor in academic language in generally as well as in ‘Bildungsprache’/ “the language of schooling” in particularly? If passive still play an important role in academic works to express the objectiveness, could we expect the same thing at the age of 15-16 year-old-students, who just learn language in school, not in academic context? In regard to compounds, the initial quantitative result shows that using compounds in first and second time test is significant (P 32 = 0.001 with T-test) In the second times, number of compounds was used increasingly Using compounds in written texts of VietnameseGerman and Vietnamese group are very different Compounds exist in most of writing texts of 31 133xxx is an anonymous identification number of participant 32 In the present study, most of stastical results will be done by SPSS with T-test P